


Space Between

by naturalchaos



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: And reunite her family, Delle Seyah's out to fuck shit up, F/F, Murder Queens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 12:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17467676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naturalchaos/pseuds/naturalchaos
Summary: Aneela needs her, and gods help whoever gets in her way.





	Space Between

**Author's Note:**

> Set just after the end of S4. I got the idea of a reunion kiss from YOLO1882 and the story just kind of....took over my hands and ran with it. All mistakes are mine - enjoy!

She was in the Space Between. 

Or at least, something very similar to the Space Between, the place she fell through, into the Greenspace. She'd been here a million times. More. She'd grown to love the Space Between, because it meant she was nearly _free_. That's what the Greenspace was. Freedom. Because even though the Lady existed there, so did Aneela's strength, and so she was free. Or as free as a caged bird could be. 

Now though, she was getting a bit restless.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been...floating? Existing? The last thing she remembered was her Papa, holding his hand out to her as the Greenspace around her crumbled to less than dust. She remembered feeling both glad and terrified, because Dutch had escaped. Yale was safe. Yale couldn't be hurt anymore, and she knew her death wasn't in vain. She was sorry to have not seen Kendry again, but she'd given Kendry a chance. She'd sent Yale back. Yale would fix everything. Yale would defeat the lady, even if she couldn't be there. She just wished she'd been able to say goodbye. 

Goodbye's were a funny thing to her. So final, but yet...temporary. She'd said goodbye to her mother once, and never seen her again. She'd said goodbye to her Papa so many times but he'd always come back until, one day, he hadn't. She'd said goodbye to Yale, that first time and known she'd come back. Hoped she'd come back. Trusted her to come back and she had, she had, she _had_. 

Kendry was her one regret. Aneela hated regrets. She didn't have many, but the ones she did have she t thinks would have haunted her forever. If she had been able to escape the Greenspace. 

So she'd called out to her Papa, because this time she wasn't going to get another chance for a goodbye. Not like the last time. Not again. She'd called to him, and he'd been there, a smile on his face like the one he wore on Qresh. When he'd been happy. When she'd been whole. And he'd held out his hand to her, one last time, and she'd reached for him like when she'd been small, wanting to feel his arms around her one more time....

And now she was in the Space Between. Or maybe, this is what death was. She'd expected....less. She knew of some humans and their foolish ideas about death. How the 'spirit' would travel to some afterworld. She'd scoffed at their ideas and clung harder into the Green. The only place someone could exist after death. After their physical presence was gone, and only their memories remained. And now the Green was gone, so she couldn't exist anymore, could she? 

But she did. Or some part of her did. Here, in this Space Between that wasn't her Space Between, where she could do nothing but exist and feel and remember her regrets. Remember Kendry. Remember Yale. Remember her family, the one she didn't get to have.

If she could have laughed, she thinks she would have. Escape one prison, only to find herself existing in another. She supposed after hundreds of years of mental torture, she shouldn't have expected the afterlife to be much different. 

–

Delle Seyah Kendry of Land Kendry, Leader of the Qreshi 9, was getting quite tired of this tedium, thank you very much. It was all so pedestrian. 

So much had happened after those damned Jaqobis brothers had dropped off her son with a weekend bag and some ill-advised quips. She wasn't sure how Jaq had survived so long with them. 

_A weekend bag_. Honestly.

Well it had been far longer than a weekend since then. It had taken them – Her, Jaq, and their onboard AI – a little under a month to reconstruct a travel-ready spacecraft. It was not nearly up to her standards, but beggars can't be choosers, and really she couldn't have stayed another moment on that stationary hunk of metal. 

Not when 3 days after Jaq had been left with her, he'd collapsed at dinner and remained unconscious for hours. She'd been out of her mind with worry and helplessness because a Kendry was never helpless but what could she _do_. When he'd finally awoken, she'd rushed to him and herd his gasp of Aneela's name, and new nothing was right. Everything was wrong. 

Not when a few hours later the sound of explosions had woken them both from restless sleep, and they'd watched their only mode of transportation being destroyed and she knew nothing could stop her from rebuilding. 

So no, she really couldn't have stayed a moment longer. 

Not when Aneela needed her. 

It wasn't a complete loss though, those three and a half weeks. It had taken days of stilted conversations, false starts, and painfully awkward dinners, but when Delle's temper had gotten the better of her one night after she'd found a crucial part of her ship beyond repair and had let out some rather unbecoming phrases (really, she thought she was alone), she'd heard surprised laughter behind her and found Jaq watching her struggle alone. How undignified. 

But after that, she started to remember those long hours on that Trees-forsaken elevator with the Jaqobis brothers, and how, after you got through their (very, _very_ ) rough exterior (and ignored the _incessant_ farting, and snoring, and breathing sounds), they were actually quite tolerable. Even...sweet. And she could see so much of that in Jaq. 

So she'd tried to relax. Tried to forget all of the regrets she had about not being able to watch him grow as she had on Qresh. All of the regrets and missed opportunities that she'd been trying to make up for in such a short amount of time. It was hard to let go, it surprised her how much. She'd only carried him a few weeks, but looking at him as a teenager forced her to realize that even in that short period, she'd developed hopes and dreams. Dreams of raising him to be the leader of the 9, leader of the Quad and beyond, raising him with Aneela by her side...

Yes. Dreams, it seemed, died quite hard. And so did regrets. But she was Delle Seyah Kendry and she would _not_ let a little (a lot) if disappointment stop her now. 

So she'd...relaxed. Well, she _tried_ to relax. She remembered Bea, and that small rush of warmth that had stoked an unimaginable amount of protectiveness in her. She remembered feeling a camaraderie with this small wisp of a girl that she'd only known a few hours, and then she'd looked at her son who despite all the odds, she loved. She'd smiled at him, and beckoned him over, and asked him for help. It had been a start. 

She got to know him over the next three weeks. This month old wonder who had the weight of the world in his eyes. She watched him learn himself, and learned with him. She learned his love of being right. She learned his love of challenge and his love of his fathers and aunt. She soothed his fear that his other family would forget him, soothed his worries that he wouldn't be enough for his other mother. She taught him of Qresh and his heritage, and taught him everything she knew about how to fight – battlefield and weapons or boardroom and words. She watched him switch between being a mini Jacobis to being a heartbreaking mirror image of Aneela. She watched him become a person, and her love for him grew every day. 

Now he smiled at her effortlessly. Teased her and huffed at her and mocked her in his teenage wisdom, and learned to love her as she loved him. She lived for the moments when she could hold him in her arms, and became glad he'd never learned her ways. Glad he never learned to withhold physical affection and hide emotions. He was a wonder. Her wonder. Their wonder. And she would burn the world to ash to keep him safe. 

But then the rebuilt ship had been deemed 'safe if not up to standard', and she'd had to uproot him from another place he'd called home in his short life. But she promised that this time, he wouldn't lose anyone. She would be by his side always, and so he'd agreed to go. After all, they had their family to save. 

It was then, hours into their journey back to that mud pit called Westerly that she'd realized she had no idea where to start looking. Should she actually be going to Westerly? They'd had a base in that dingy little bar they loved so much, but surely even they weren't stupid enough to use such an insecure place to conduct the destruction of the Lady. 

So. Not Westerly then. And surely not Qresh, Leith, or even Arkyn. No, it would have been one of those ships. But which one? The RAC or the Armada? 

She eventually decided on the Armada, and if that reason was solely based on the history she had with Aneela there, well, no one would ever know would they? 

But the Armada had been a ghost town. One that she absolutely had not let go of Jaq's hand the entirety of their time aboard. It worried her, this ghost town. There should have been some trace...and then they'd found it. A tub that looked all too familiar, filled with a smokey grey, green-tinged water that set her teeth on edge. Something was very, very wrong. 

So they'd searched the RAC and found the same, ghostly emptiness and then made their way to Old Town, where all her fears of wrongness were confirmed the minute they landed. Nothing was right. Everything was wrong. Green smoke stacks dominated the city. And no-one remembered. 

It took her another week in which she honestly considered pulling her own hair out with the _slowness_ of it all to track down “Auntie Zeph”, as Jaq called her. She had been working as a farmer, of all things, on Leith with no recollection of what had happened, and it took yet another week to get “Auntie Zeph” to remember she was actually intelligent and working on a cure. 

The entire time, that green smoke haunted her dreams. 

She'd given Zephyr a test subject – that annoying little man with the horrendous haircut, Truman, she thinks his name was – and left her to it, desperate to not waste another second on finding more clues about Aneela. 

It took time. So much infuriating time, to ferret out the Lady's influence on Old Town. Jaq could sense his mother near, their connection confusing but strong, but he couldn't pinpoint anything. He said it was like she was in the fog that surrounded Old Town – misty and incorporeal and not quite _there_. She refused to consider exactly what that meant. 

She started with the green smoke, which turned up nothing but an infuriatingly clueless Johnny Favorite. That had given Zephyr a new test subject, which she was all too happy to receive. They'd then run into none other than D'avin Jaqobis with an actual warrant _for her son_. Oh, how she'd seen red. 

Honestly the man was incredibly lucky that Jaq had been asleep when she had, or she would have made sure to make him suffer for hurting her son. For breaking his promise to never forget Jaq. Actually, on second thought, she thought she'd make him suffer anyway. So she had taken him to join his brother, their son none the wiser of his father's unknowing betrayal. 

Then she'd tracked down every trees-forsaken idiot she'd ever come in contact with on Westerly and had followed their trail of clues back to the last place she'd thought of, but the first place she should have. 

The Armada. 

That damned grey pool with it's green-tinged haze that warned her from approaching. So this time, she did it anyway. She made Jaq stand as far away from the pool as she could get him and extracted a promise from him that he _would not move_ until she told him it was alright. Then she'd taken a deep breath, and plunged her hand into the pool. 

She screams. 

–

It felt like...someone had shoved a hand of ice into her heart. She wasn't sure she had a heart anymore, floating here in the Space Between, but she imagined if she still did that's what it would feel like. It was so cold, she burned from the inside out. 

The thinks if she had a face and lungs, she would have gasped. Maybe she would have screamed. Instead, she imagines the hands she once had tethering themselves to ice.

–

It feels like she's being turned to smoke and reforming, over and over. It doesn't....hurt, exactly. But the memories do. They hurt, because they're Aneela's. They hurt because it's like she's in the Green again, but she doesn't have the barrier of being Hullen and separate. Instead, she feels every single one, and every single one _hurts_. 

Then her hand that is smoke but not smoke touches rests on something that is both there and not. Is grasped by something that is both there and not. She feels herself gasp and _pulls_. She pulls her hand out of the water and at once she is solid. She pulls her hand out and pulls what's tethered to her with it. Pulls _who_ is tethered to her with it. 

She's dripping wet and gasping and choking and looking around like she has no idea what's happening. But it's her. She _knows_. 

“Aneela?”

Eyes that she's missed for weeks that have felt like years snap to hers, and everything else fades away. 

“Kendry...”

She surges forward and wraps her arms around Aneela, feeling like she'd been floating through space and hadn't known it and now she'd been brought back and grounded by something she didn't even realize she'd needed. _A tether_. 

She takes a deep breath and pulls just away just far enough to see Aneela's face. To drink her in. She's still dripping wet, though luckily she's clothed. Her hair is loose and matted and flung about her shoulders and her eyes seem wetter than the rest of her, wild and unsure and a little awed. Delle watches a drop of water fall from her hairline down to her chin, and lower and forces her eyes up again as a cold hand rests on her cheek. 

“How are you here, Kendry? How...how am I here?” 

Delle rests her hand over Aneela's. “I'm not sure, but we'll figure it out. We'll figure everything out. Together.”

She leans in, desperate to feel those lips she'd missed so much against hers, and hears the tiniest cough from behind her. A flush meets her cheeks at the reminder that their not exactly alone and she pulls back, looking towards her son, _their_ son, and beckons him over. 

“Aneela, I'd like you to meet your son. Our son. Jaqobis Ozzman Kin-Rit, this is your other mother. This is Aneela.” 

She watches as they stare at each other, transfixed, wondering, unsure. It's Jaq who makes the first move, and she is so overwhelmingly proud of him it nearly chokes her. He reaches out and gently touches her cheek, before slowly leaning down to wrap his arms around her. 

“Hello, mother. It's nice to finally meet you.”

She watches as Aneela stiffens, surprised at the foreign touch. Then slowly, ever so slowly, her body relaxes and she brings her arms up around his slender, fragile body. He waits patiently, sensing that she just needs time, and he's more than happy to give it. 

“Hello, Jaq.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, and she doesn't really know what to say, but he seems to understand that too, and she is grateful. 

Delle sees the fear in Aneela's eyes, but also the hope as their gaze meets again, and she smiles and beckons them up, beckons them on. 

“Come, you two. We have work to do. And I believe your mother would like a bath.” 

They part slowly and glance shyly at each other. Delle doesn't think she's ever seen Aneela look _shy_ about anything but she's struck again by how much similarity she sees between them. 

Aneela stands slowly, as if learning how to use her legs again. Jaq returns to her side and she strokes his hair – something she finds that she rather enjoys doing, these days. “Jaq, why don't you go get the ship ready for the trip back to Westerly?” 

He grins at her – both knowing the reason she wants him to leave and still excited that she's letting him have this small bit of responsibility – and leaves them blessedly alone. 

She turns to Aneela and wants to say something witty, something smart or sweet or really _anything_ , but instead she grasps Aneela's chin in one hand and brings their lips together.She feels Aneela's hands in her hair and at her waist and wraps her own as tightly around the taller woman as she can, clinging, as the warmth from Aneela's touch runs through her. 

It's like their first kiss all over again. Slightly unsure after so much time, but _wanting_. She breathes Aneela in, feels her breath on her lips and the fire that's roaring between them. She feels the firmness silk of her lips and tastes nothing but _Aneela_ and she never wants it to stop. 

But they have work to do. How annoying.

She slows their kisses, sipping at Aneela's lips until she knows if she doesn't stop, she won't, and that is going to have to wait for later. Instead, she lands her final kiss on Aneela's nose, drawing an uncharacteristic smile from the Queen. _Her_ Queen. 

Her arms loosen and one hand drops to grasp Aneela's tightly.

“Come, my love. Let's go save our family.”

And they do.


End file.
